Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to HIRAM POWERS, dated February 15, 1864.
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Dear Powers
I have just got back from Milan, whither I went to see the king through the fooleries of the carnevalone, & can write but a word.
The photographs have arrived & are most welcome. They will delight many an eye, & the proceeds will gladden many a sufferer.
I shall be very thankful for copies of the Eve,
& will see that they go only into good hands. I thought it
as fine as
possible in plaster but I now see that it is many degrees finer in marble.
Mr George W. Van Horne, U.S. Consul at Marseilles, will receive & forward to
N.Y. all contributions. Please box your most liberal gift, & send it to him,
I will be responsible for all expenses. It seems to me as fine a bust of W. as we have. I never liked Stewart's
Washington quite. Yours is more like Houdon's, which Judge Marshall thought so well
of & gives the expression, which Stewart's
head
does not. The mouth & lips of Greenough's always much displeased me. In Houdon's statue, the head is
thrown up in an arrogant, theatrical sort of a way which you have quite avoided.
On to Crawford's, there is an evident attempt to an expression for which there is no authority.
Bad news from home. There is, as I have always insisted, treason very high up in our government. Longstreet has been threatening Knoxville two months. Why was the garrison not reinforced? Why were the rebels allowed to take island No 60 in the Miss. with the negroes?
Yours in hasteG P Marsh
H Powers Esq
References in this letter:
"Eve Disconsolate," a full-size bust of a nude female figure made in 1862, was taken from the full-size statue of the same name which Powers sculpted between 1859 and 1861 and which, Powers wrote, depicts "Eve accusing the serpent." Over the next decade numerous marble replicas were sold, several of which are today in American museums like the Smithsonian Institution, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 1832 Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) received a commission for a monumental statue of George Washington to be placed in the center of the rotunda of the Capitol. Installed in 1841, the statue depicts a seated, semi-nude Washington pointing to heaven with his right hand and extending a sheathed sword with his left. Widespread criticism of the statue centered on its nudity and air of Olympian hauteur. In 1843 the statue was removed at Greenough's request to the lawn before the main (eastern) entrance to the Capitol, where it remained for sixty-five years. It is today in the National Museum of American Art in Washington.
Thomas Crawford's bronze equestrian statue of George Washington, cast in Ferdinand von Mller's foundry in Munich, was erected in Capitol Square in Richmond, Va., in February, 1858, four months after Crawford's death.
After Federal troops under General Ambrose Burnside occupied Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 2, 1863, Confederate troops under General James Longstreet instituted a siege that lasted from early November to early December. It was lifted as a result of the Union victory at Chattanooga on November 25.